


As I Was Going To St. Ives

by globalfruitbat



Category: Jasper Fforde -- Thursday Next Series
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-20
Updated: 2009-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-04 18:56:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/33063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/globalfruitbat/pseuds/globalfruitbat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Landen Parke-Laine would have an interesting anecdote or 2 to share over dinner -- if he ever remembered.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As I Was Going To St. Ives

**Author's Note:**

  * For [firstlightofeos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstlightofeos/gifts).



When everything had been fixed, later on, and everyone was back where they were meant to be, with the right amounts of existence, Thursday had asked him if he remembered anything.

He hadn't, of course. He had been eradicated, and then he had been reactualised, and there hadn't been a moment in between where he had been anything at all.

So there wasn't anything for him to remember. Thursday wondered, from time to time, he could tell, but he didn't have anything to tell her. He had gone from something to nothing back to something, but one only could have noticed from the outside.

However, if he had _been_ on the outside, he might have noticed a few interesting anecdotes that would have made good conversation over cocktails and small sausages, if they ever went to the sort of dinner parties where one could talk about the time one had spent eradicated. But they didn't.

***

"But I don't want new stairs! The stairs in my house are just fine!" Landen blocked the door with his foot, very unwilling to let a large number 2 and 2 pairs of 4s, or perhaps 2 44s into his house. The situation was not helped by the large staircase the 4 4s, or the 2 44s, were propping up.

"The situation is sir, that your staircase is sadly overdue for a rehauling. It needs being taken away and this one put in its place." The officious 2 turned to the group of 4s behind it and barked **[hup hup! let's get this set up now!]**, and almost immediately the staircase started to trundle its way into Landen's cozy bungalow.

"What? No! I don't need new stairs!" Landen jumped aside, almost losing the buttons off his shirt to the sharp corners of a 4. But whether he liked it or not, it seemed he was getting new stairs. The fact that they were going up to a non-existent second story, just like the pre-existing set of stairs, and the 3 sets before that, seemed too irrelevant to mention.

When the 4s (or 44s) and 2s were gone, Landen tried, without a great deal of success, to maneuver his living room back into some semblance of order. This should have been easy, as the replacement stairs looked identical to the old stairs, but by some strange chance seemed almost twice as inconvenient. His calculator shelves and his paper and pencil storage unit ended up trapped in the small closet beneath the stairs, and his lamp kept hopping up the stairs, banging its light-bulb against the ceiling. Nothing he could do seemed to make any difference, so eventually he gave up and decided he might as well do his shopping.

There was hardly anything left in the fridge, he discovered, and the cupboards were nearly as empty. He was sure that he had been to the shops not that long before, but as time was just another calculation that could be solved with a large enough piece of paper, he no longer tried to keep track of the days. Even being sure that there were days that passed at all was tricky at the best of times. He'd tried to suss it out, once and for all, a few months after he first set up his bungalow, or possibly just last week, but when he'd made his inquiry at the Department of Infinity, he'd ended up waiting in line for so long that he had forgotten what it was that had sent him there and didn't remember again until he got home.

Landen packed up his travel kit – abacus, compass, eraser – in his sturdy canvas rucksack and pulled his helmet over his head. He locked up all the windows and doors and tried without any success at all to remove the lamp from the top of the stairs. Then he took a deep breath, walked out the front door, locking it behind him, down to the end of the path and jumped off, into the dark.

He thought as clearly and as evenly as he could about the #s Market, and once he felt that he had the direction set in his head, he pulled out his compass, spun it in a quick circle over his head and scrambled up through it.

Luckily, he'd been exact in his mental arithmetic and as he'd hoped, had landed on the outskirts of the #s Market. As he got closer, he could hear the calls of the vendors, offering the best %s, the freshest +s and –s of the day. Landen had only a partial taste for the wares of the Symbol Sellers, but he did truly enjoy a hearty { } pie, dressed with a hot =.

**[you sir! you look like a fellow who enjoys the taste of a plump fresh *, or even this, harvested today, right from the herds of the king, a truss of ///\\\\\\!]**

A florid 9 leaned over its counter, thrusting its ///s and \\\\\s out into his path. On his other side, 2 more 9s beckoned, holding shiny ^s and ∞s, but Landen knew from experience that 9s only sold overstuffed Symbols. The Lane of 4s was where he could find the freshest foods with which to fill his cupboards.

Landen filled his rucksack with those things he felt he could turn into something closely resembling textures he was used to, and then headed for home. Unfortunately enough, he'd gotten so turned around in the #s Market that when he jumped off the path into the dark, his mental calculations had been slightly off and he ended up on the top of his house. He stayed there for 3 weeks that time, or possible only 20 minutes. He could never be sure, time went wobbly when one had been eradicated.

***

Landen Parke-Laine lived a calm life. His wife treated reality as if it was nothing more than a robe to take off before jumping into bed, but he enjoyed most the worlds in his words. It was why they were so well matched, the two of them. They both loved and cherished the words that shaped every world.

Even if he had been able to remember what happened between Yes I Am and Yes I Am, what would have been there for him?

However, the places his son ended up visiting…


End file.
